To Sir, with love

He walks into the class just when all of us are struggling hard to stay awake. He sits on the chair with an air of  a king adorning his throne and starts shooting us with his wise anecdotes. He is none other than Prof. S. P Srinivasan, professor of finance who taught us Accounting and a lot more than that in our first term. His fan club in Orkut boasts of a staggering 900+ people. (Of course, I being one of them). Well, this was a brief introduction about one of the best teachers I have ever come across.

Right from day one, he made Accounting seem like a subject of wonder. Number-crunching is by default there but he makes it so much more enthusiastic by adding his own versions of stories,idioms and jokes.. I know a few of my batch mates do sleep in his class too but sorry guys, I can never get bored in his classes. He has captivated me with his knowledge! After he starts his lecture he consciously veers off to a different(more often, unrelated) topic altogether and at the end of the lecture we realize that he had actually covered one of the important topics in the syllabus. I am a student who has had no A, B or C of experience in Accounting  whatsoever and so I am all ears in his classes and the awe that I have for him is never going to wane away.

I am currently having a terrible allergic cough. Actually, symptoms started showing a month ago when there was a wide-spread swine flu mania, all around! BUT! Not to worry.. I cough only when the dust is looming around. So lets keep the flu at bay! Anyway, I remember myself coughing heavily in one of his classes on a  Monday morning, and what made it all the more noticeable was the fact that I was sitting on the second row, first seat. As he was going on about his lecture on Accounting suddenly he changed tracks by mentioning how people are falling ill a lot these days due to lack of proper fitness and nutrition. There he tells that and I notice all heads turning towards me  :). He told how important it is to be healthy and to play often. As he said that I suddenly felt ashamed of how low health was on my priority list. At the same time,I felt so special. He had actually noticed that I was ill. Often, it takes a classroom lecture to teach you what your parents cannot! I blamed myself rather than blaming the hostel food. I was so engulfed with tests, assignments and classes, I at times skipped breakfast and followed such erratic sleeping schedules that my fitness had started dwindling. Play till you sweat, he said! Yes sir, I shall follow it with renewed vigor from the beginning of this term. I hope my roomies aren't reading this :P

Regarding my performance in his paper, it's better left untold. But now that I mentioned it anyways, let me tell you that he threw a googly and I was bowled out! My balance sheet did match but it showed a figure which clearly looked manipulated, something which Auditing Standards would never approve of :P . And this is happening to me when I am planning to major in Finance! God save the world.

Some of his quotes which shall remain etched in my memory forever:
"Accounting is all about know-why and know-how"
"The horse will fly"
"Never anticipate profit but provide for all losses"
"MBA is all about managing yourself"
"......ACTUALLY" - This word almost ends every statement of his and the particular tone he uses this word with is just inimitable.

Sir,
The pearls of wisdom you have shared with us shall continue to adorn our lives forever.
Thank you for your unending supply of quotes.

Looking forward to more of your classes!

Home away from home!

Its been two months now. Pretty late to blog on something that happened a couple of months back but hey! You cant expect a student to blog everyday of her life :) Well, times have changed. Things too. Life is no more mundane but hectic. A day of 24hrs seems to be very short. Lack of sleep and lot of work to do. This is the life of a prospective MBA and do you hear me complaining? Well, Hostel life doesnt seem alien anymore. I am living it every moment. Besides, what's better than living in a hostel in your hometown ? My college is compulsorily residential and I get to go home on weekends, meet my old friends and I realize I still belong here. Although, its kinda funny.. to be a hosteller in your native but what the heck! Cest la vie! :)

More about life at the hostel.. I was once upon a time, the most pampered kid at home. With an elder sister and brother in law on one side who would shower me with gifts and dad and mom on the other side showing abundant love and care, I was a spoilt brat. Lazy. Unhelpful. well, I will leave you with these two adjectives for the time-being. Today I wash my clothes,I eat on time (i dont wait to be coaxed) and I cant be any happier.. Hostel-life teaches you a lot of things. You start taking care of yourself, the most important of all. You are no longer under the cosy wrap of your parents. You are out there in the world ready to live on your own. My professor says "living in hostel is in itself a way of learning to manage things.. " If you are a people's person it is your calling. You get to live with people from different backgrounds and cultures. Our college is a heady cocktail indeed with respect to languages and cultures. The fun in gossiping that we do on those night-outs of toiling during exams, making maggi in the middle of the night and fighting for every noodle strand as if we have never seen maggi.. LOL.. it is just getting better.. Trust me, these things will never come back. The moment is ours.. to live and enjoy..

Moreover, I can relate to all these even better. Having worked for 2 years, my getting back to college life is like a trip to goa. A breath of fresh air. There are strings attached however. (read exams). :P

Transition from a techie to an MBA seems very enthusing. Albeit I learnt hard core programming during my work-life, all other things seemed stagnant. My outlook on life was very narrow. I now put my brains into every subject. As one of my professors often quips, MBA is a broader understanding of how things are while others delve deeper into one specific field. Learning management primarily teaches you to manage yourself first.

To brag about how good I feel,I can only measure it by saying how busy I am. Post-classes, not one evening do we have for ourselves. You have to be on your toes, literally! There are foreign students visiting our campus every now and then. Ongoings of contests and cultural fests and a bunch of seminars. And this is only a pie of the whole cake that I have started to taste..one of my favourite teachers says "lack of sleep testifies that you are an MBA student". I just seem to be in awe of this professor of mine. Well, he needs a separate blog for himself and I dont want to deviate from the topic of discussion at the moment. :) let me give you a peek into the fields of learning. I was once a hard core math kid but today, accountancy seems to get the better of me. we learn subjects ranging from Communication skills, Business Ethics, Statistics, IT (my cuppa tea) to Organisational culture, Behavioral aspects (a peek into human behavior) etcetera. Coupled with these are the innumerable assignments, surprise tests (Questions are as surprising as ever!) and presentations. Phew!! One bunch of googlies thrown at you.

Two more weeks and I will be done with my first term. Pretty fast-moving, I must say!

Squeezed in some time to write this. I had to write! There was this itch to blog.. Signing off for now..adios!

Beat the monster out of recession

The current scenario of economic downturn should be considered a blessing in disguise. Following factors emphasize why it should be treated so:

• In turbulent times like these, one should sit back and ponder over how to enhance one's profile to suit more challenging roles offered in the industry. Since there is a huge demand for skilled workers, job aspirants' focus should indeed be upon developing more skills than merely do the job hunting. This will certainly stand a candidate in good stead.

• Secondly, the economic downturn is an eye-opener of sorts for the employers who at once went on a hiring spree regardless of the candidate's competency and thus there was a total chaotic atmosphere in the workplace as there was an insufficient talent pool and it always so happened that there was never a right man for the right job. It has now dawned upon the employers to scrutinize the candidates effectively and then hire them thus preventing the ineffective usage of resources.

• Education opens up opportunities. The higher one is qualified, the better are the opportunities that knock at one's doorstep. There was never a time as right as now to enhance your resume by adding that extra qualification you always wanted to gain. Time is now ripe to study further, to go ahead and pursue that degee you always dreamed of. An additional qualification is not just an extra degree on the paper, but a tool which you can use to market yourself better!

• Employees who were shown the door during the past few months, instead of sitting back and cursing their fate, whining about what could have thwarted that fateful decision of your boss, can use that as a boon by making use of their creative potential and start something from scratch. It can be a small idea which is sure to take you places if only you put a little more effort into making it big. You must remember that it is never too late unless you give up. Albert Einstein is only remembered for the great theories that he has put forth and not for being a school dropout. Had he sat back and delved into the miseries, he would never be able to prove E=mc*2. Entrepreneurship is the key to confidence and learning and what's better than being your own boss and not having to be afraid of getting laid off!!

We must always bear in mind that times like recession are always short-lived and what goes up has to come down and vice versa. Instead of mulling over, use the circumstances to the best of your advantage and embrace it as a challenge. Only then the best in you is unveiled as a man's latent strength always comes out in tough times!!

Wikiphilia

In yesterday's newspaper, it said that UK is soon going to include Twitter and Wikipedia in its primary curriculum. Bingo! It caught my attention and I was overwhelmed with the idea. It is simply fabulous and highly beneficial for the tiny-tots to learn things with Wikipedia. Imagine of what use Wikipedia will be if our country's rural populace gets to learn stuff from the internet, let alone Wikipedia.

Wiki is so omnipresent in the web that the simplest of the words have found their places in wiki. Be it the definition of Wikipedia itself :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

Defined as the largest free encyclopaedia, it is often updated to cover the latest events under the subject of the article. It is so exhaustive and informative that in most of the cases, the first of the search results in Google will be that of wiki's.

To quote a simple example of its wide labyrinthine reach, I watched Godfather trilogy last week.( Finally!!) and discovered in myself a huge fan of Al Pacino's.(Man! His looks are killing!!). TO know everything about him, I simply typed Al Pacino in the famous Google search engine and there in a split second came a trillion results with the wiki one on the top. Click, Click! There appeared a wiki page displaying the A-Z and more of Al Pacino's life. I found it so interesting. The only thing that disappointed me was his age :P How I wish he was born a little later or I was born a little earlier.

Jokes apart, I really feel wiki should be made part of the curriculum throughout the world. Knowledge is infinite and the more you get it, the more you crave for.

So all you guys out there, go and get wikied! :)

Jeans is just not in the genes!

It was just another day when I was getting ready to go to college. I got ready, descended the stairs and went to ask my mom for breakfast. There she stood in the living room scanning me top to bottom as if she was checking me out. Why do mothers always do this? I wore the jeans that I had bought recently. I used to wear jeans even before but not very often. Ever since I joined college, I wore jeans like I had no other clothing to afford. It was something I felt most

comforable in. And ofcourse, more chic. She muttered something under her breath which sounded like "Children of these days do not know the indian culture anymore. They have forgotten it."I don't remember what I had retorted back then.

Fast forward 3 yrs. Last friday, I wore my favorite pepe jeans and came down asking for breakfast. My mom again scanned me from top to bottom. :) Well, mothers are typical mothers. Over-protective about their children. But do you hear me complaining? I have always loved the attention. :P

Going back to the living-room scene, I heard this :"You have lost all the sanskriti. You dont abide by the Indian culture anymore". I frowned. This was it. I was frustrated with being accused of not following Indian culture any longer. I kept mum. Two days later, it was probably time for the showdown. Yesterday,after I went home from office, she served me hot cup of coffee and only both of us were at home. For once, I was neither exhausted by the traffic that delayed my arrival nor was I tired. I was all energetic and started talking to her. (which is a rarity on weekdays after I go home).

The conversation started from where I dont remember. But I heard a word and I was all ears. It was "Indian Culture". Bull's eye. This time I had to prove myself that I was in every way Indian. My mom and I were always at war of words :-) . Somewhere in the middle of the row, my dad used to intrude and stop further drama. He wanted to continue watching the TV, you know. :P

Okay, here continued the conflict of opinions. She told me, like always, "these days you find girls wearing jeans to temples also. They dont have respect for culture and tradition." I dont treat her opinions as anti-youth. It was how she was brought up and I respect every ounce of it. I told her, as long as someone knows how to dress in what kind of occasions it shouldnt be a problem. I loved this statement as I always followed it. :D I never wear jeans to any unsuitable occasions. Not that I was against it, I simply did not want to disappoint my mother. Knowing the comfort of jeans, I would wear it even while I was dying.

I continued the argument. I told her " Mom, tell me one thing. Jeans is something which leaves nothing uncovered. (If you wear a decent kurta/shirt on it, I mean). What do you say for the epitome of Indian culture,the famous Indian saree which one can use to dare and bare. Almost everyone knows that while draping a saree, it exposes some part of the stomach. It depends on how you wear it also. The Blouse can get as spunky as you would want it to be , that's with the

noolde strap blouses these days. If wearing saree was cultured , was wearing noodle-strap blouse too? ". She dint say anything. It's all in the mind, they say. So I say too. Times are changing, we know that. But it all depends on you as to how you carry your learnings and tradition. If an Indian woman astronaut goes on spaceship will she be condemned if she wears jeans? Or will she be applauded if she wears a saree? She would rather just wear an astronaut suit which would make her feel comfortable for that breath-taking journey of her life. Besides, it is such a pain to drape those 6 yards around you and walk comfortably, to be cautious of the pallu( which threatens to fall off if not attended to) and to arrange the pleats (the mastermind of all). If you happen to stumble upon them, you either trip foolishly or worse, fall flat on the earth.

As the saying goes, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. Evil always lies in the mind of the criminal.(This is my version). It is the way you see things. As for representing the country, I would prefer doing it by actions to doing it by dressing up.

Parting thoughts.. It is upto us to draw the line. Where to wear what and where not to wear what. No offence is meant in anyway. Saree was and will always be the most respected form of indian attire. And yes, it is still considered one of those attires which make women look irresistible.